Blogs

The Telco Blog

About this blog

We will cover the telecommunications ecosystem composed of service providers, network equipment manufacturers, and mobile. While the originators of the blog are from IBM Rational it will not be limited to that in scope.

Tags

You hear lots about “testing” in all industries, as testing leads to reduced defects, which leads to quality. Automation is even better as it decreases the time testing, which decreases costs, which is expensive as it can consume over 50% of the entire cost of delivering product in some industries. In the case of telcos, this means happy customers that will be repeat customers. Customer churn for service providers is prime concern in the Telco industry on a global level. In my experience, I’ve been involved in testing of a product in... [More]

A recent discussion with one of our System Architect has brought up a very interesting comparison: how telecom networks are really a big SCADA system. For those unfamiliar with the term, SCADA stands for "Supervisory, Control, and Data Acquisition". These systems are common within certain industries such as utilities (e.g., power or water distribution) and plant operations (e.g., power or manufacturing). These systems are put in place so that, from a central location (e.g., a power distribution network's control centre or a plant's... [More]

Every day, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) around the world perform a balancing act between the need for new business initiatives and technology versus the need to contain costs and ensure overall efficiency. With exploding data traffic and the ever mounting pressure to reduce spending, CSPs will be forced to find new and innovate ways to reduce expenditures while improving operational efficiency. However legacy architectures and processes, disparate systems, and outdated applications result in high maintenance costs, leading to... [More]

For anyone who hasn’t seen it a few days ago IBM released a
press release about a new technology advance that allows light speed connection
between chips in a server farm. This is a large step forward in the technology
of moving data inside data farms. Here is a link to the press release. You also
can find commentary in many other technical sources as well. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/39641.wss The question is how does this affect the telco industry? In my view this has a huge affect long term on this
industry. One of... [More]